Japanese Salsa with a side of Soul

No, I'm not talking recipes here. I'm talking about this great story from The Root.com about a Black-American woman who found her bliss teaching salsa dancing in Japan. Don't you love it?

About her reasons for not only going to Japan in the first place, but sticking around and making her home there as well, Ammenah Shareef Asante was quoted as saying:

"Japan is one of the few places in the world I can be respected for what I do. As a black woman when I walk out of my door, I’m looked at as a foreigner. I go into the store they aren’t looking at me trying to figure out if I’m going to steal something. It’s just curiosity about who I am as a human being, and it’s fabulous.

I was so angry growing up, with all of the racial garbage there is in the States and coming to Japan was so freeing."

Interestingly, this is what I thought Spain was going to be for me. But for those of you who read my memoir know, "freeing" probably wouldn't be the word I would use to describe my experience. Well, in some ways it was freeing but there would have to be a caveat, in that it was freeing with a dose of "slightly annoying" on the side. But I digress.

My point here today is that I love hearing about where people choose to go in order to live the life they imagined for themselves. I'm not sure if I have the courage to uproot myself to find that place although I dream about it often or I just check in with some of my favorite bloggers, like Ragazza in Rome and My Girl in Barcelona and live vicariously through them.

So where do you think you would have to go to live your best life? Right now I'm feeling like the South of France or Portugal. But maybe Japan deserves my consideration. Hmmm.

I'm listening.

Peace.

Japa-Negro

Happy New Year Meltingpot readers! Thanks for coming back. I hope 2008 will be filled with thought-provoking and fascinating blog posts featuring loads and loads of cultural cross pollination.

So on that note...right before break I had the opportunity to share a meal with author extraordinaire, Veronica Chambers. We were talking about her latest book, Kickboxing Geishas which is all about fierce Japanese women, and I asked her where her fascination with Japanese culture came from. Her answer surprised me. She said that she views Japan, specifically Tokyo, like the Paris of the 1920s in that the Japanese people have a unique love affair with Black-American culture.

I'd never heard this before. As a black hair "expert" I knew that there were a lot of Japanese people rockin' dredlocks and into the whole hip-hop aesthetic, but I didn't realize the love affair included Black art, music and literature. So now I want to know more. I want to know about the Black experience in Japan. I found this blog Sista in Tokyo written by a young Black American woman working in Japan. And then there's the Japan African-American Friendship Organizationwhich really made me smile.

Now of course I know that there is no country where all people are really considered equal. But it sure tickles me to know that there is a place half way around the world that technically has no real connection to an African past, but yet and still the people have in some way embraced it.

Can somebody tell me more about the Black experience in Japan?

Peace.